Ecuador: The Huaorani People of the Amazonia, self-isolation and forced contact

Huaorani culture and society is shaped by their will to self-isolation. Very little is known about their past, except that they have for centuries constituted nomadic and autarkic enclaves fiercely refusing contact, trade and exchange with their powerful neighbours, be they indigenous or white-mestizo colonists. Ever since their tragic encounter with North American missionaries in 1956, the Huaorani have held a special place in journalistic and popular imagination as "Ecuador's last savages". Despite the "civilizing" efforts of missionaries, they have largely retained their distinctive way of understanding the world. Relations with outsiders, seen as murderous enemies, are fraught with hostility and fear; there seems to be little space for communication and exchange, other than complete avoidance or the threat to 'spear-kill'.

For the last sixty years, Huaorani history has unfolded in response to oil development, although it is only recently (in 1994) that oil has been commercially extracted from their land. In 1969, a decade after having "pacified" the Huaorani, the Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL) received government authorisation to create a protection zone around its mission. The 'Protectorate' (66,570 hectares, or 169,088 acres) represented one tenth of the traditional territory. By the early 1980s, five-sixth of the population had been called to live in the Protectorate. On April 1990, the Huaorani were granted the largest indigenous territory in Ecuador (679,130 hectares, or 1,098,000 acres). It is contiguous with the Yasuní National Park (982,300 hectares, or 2,495,000 acres), and includes the former Protectorate. The population (around 1,700) is now distributed in thirty or so semi-permanent settlements organised around a primary school, except for one, or possibly two, small groups that cling to autarky, and hide in the remote forested areas of the Pastaza province, along the international border separating Peru from Ecuador.

The non-contacted Huaorani, known as the Tagaeri and the Taromenani, comprise between thirty and eighty people. The Tagaeri used to live in the Tiputini region, which became the heart of the southern oil fields in the early 1980s. The Tagaeri decided to separate permanently from the main Huaorani population when the SIL mission caused a major population displacement by actively encouraging the eastern groups to come and live under SIL authority within the Protectorate. Relatives of the Tagaeri who now live in the Protectorate say that the latter’s decision was partly due to intra-tribal feuding (they did not want to live in the territory of their enemies), and partly to their straight refusal to integrate; they did not wish to receive "the benefits" of civilisation. In other words, it was their political decision to live in isolation.

During the next thirty years, many raiding and killing episodes marred the interactions between Tagaeri and outsiders. Famous for their fierceness, the Tagaeri have ‘spear killed’ oil workers, missionaries, and others whom they saw as intruders. Most famously, they killed an Archbishop from the Capuchin Mission and a Colombian nun from the Laurita mission in July 1987. And their people have been wounded and killed as well. In the early 1990s, various informants told me that military helicopters had thrown rockets on Tagaeri longhouses, and that Tagaeri dwellings had been burnt down by company security guards. There was once a plan to exterminate them all. And then the hope, especially amongst missionaries, that they would finally surrender and accept 'pacification'. Oil exploration in the block where the Archbishop and the nun had been found dead was suspended, and the government promised to grant protection to the non-contacted Huaorani who kept fleeing away from the blocks operated by PetroCanada, Texaco, PetroBras, Shell, and Elf Aquitaine. The implicit policy, though, was to push them further to the south, in the hope that they would cross the border with Peru, and cease to be a national problem.

The number of Ecuadorians illegally entering the US by sea has surpassed the number of Cuban boat people or illegal Haitian immigrants, according to a recent study by the US Embassy in Quito, Ecuador. The source of the problem is that the Ecuadorian government is not funding any resources to stop this wave of emigration, as they do not give it priority in their budget and military planning.

The Ecuadorian immigrants have thus become protagonists of the largest wave of maritime illegal immigration in modern history, according to the Embassy.

"THEY ARE INFESTING the hole EST coast of America. After their economy collapsed in 2000 and they adopted the US dollars so they can sell their ass easily to sex tourist,they discovered a new land other than their shit hole Mestizos Republic AKA Ecuador. They discovered that they can illegally immigrate to U.S.A. and its 10,000 times better than ekhuador ...They are infesting all the NYC , NJ, LI large part of CT...They live just like RATS with their inferiority complex as the largest wave of Mestizos immigration in modern history always struggling with the deep scare of inferiority that they have vis a vis of Colombians and all other ethnic.. groups in general.....But anyway it's better than the amazon jungle where they come from, plus they can make more than 5 dollars a day (average income in Ecuador among middle and upper class, 80% of Ecuador population lives under poverty line).

They feel dangerously down as an savage unknown Ethnic group descendent from amazon Indians, Mexicans and Colombians look at them as the shame of Hispanics in U.S.A. ...."